Wouldn't a pack(a[U*log_10(U)], 'z') do the trick?

Thanks Aristotle, I was too lazy/huried to check the correct syntax. The length of the string we want to allocate is N = U*ceil(log_10(U)), so I hoped pack(aN, '') would create a string of N '\0' characters using some low level memory allocation function. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to happen, the resulting string consists of N spaces, so there goes constant time... :(

Just my 2 cents, -gjb-

In reply to Re: Re: Data structure challenge by gjb
in thread Data structure challenge by Abigail-II

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